My 19th c. childhood reading list, or learning how to read

When queried about my childhood reading list, I discovered that mine was from the 19th c., not the 1950s & 60s, the era I grew up in. ‘Splains a lot. Someone asked me, what was I, educated by nuns? Practically, with a no-nonsense Irish granny at the helm who had little interest in American bourgeois culture.

It took a while to unravel my childhood reading list pattern. I tried Wikipedia’s year-by-year entries and discovered that I’d read only a few popular books published during the 1950s and the 1960s. I went back decade by decade, from the 1940s to the turn of the last century, and still I only garnered less than a dozen books. Wow. 

Frustrated, I googled the most overlooked children’s books of the 19th c. Paydirt!  I should add that I read the long, unabridged versions. The nitty and the gritty was my childhood reading landscape. No pablum books. Unless you considered Robinson, Wilde, and Joyce to be kinder-fodder.

What a strange child I was. I hated any books that had talking animals, or anything that was properly infantilized for children. I loved fairy tales, the darker, the better. A bonus, those old fairytale books hadn’t yet been bowdlerized. I hated those upbeat false reality books with sugar-coated endings. I hated clever rhyming books, so Dr. Seuss was out. I preferred those boys adventure and sleuth series to the girly books. Hardy Boys, or the X Bar X boys over Nancy Drew or Little House on the Prairie. 

Anything to do with horses, I read it, no matter what the era. No Laura Wilder, no Bev Cleary, and no EB White. No Pooh, no thieving mice, no spelling spiders, nor even Sendak’s wild things—even though he lived in Sausalito. There was no escaping Dr. Seuss, who was trotted out by teachers everywhere. But in my horizon there were none of the usual usual childhood reading landscape popular during the 1950s and 60s. How did I not know this? 

Of course, most of my unauthorized childhood reading material came from what was on the bookshelves in the basement. My grandmother’s musty old bookshelves. Ones that survived the onslaught of eight boisterous children, and a permanent move from the San Francisco Victorian on 3rd Ave., to the old summer house in Forest Knolls.

Also, another significant source of my reading material came from thrift stores, whether from our next-door neighbor’s sister Borg, or my aunt Toddy who used to bring me books in 50-pound potato sacks. I remember one late winter afternoon, sobbing in the hedge over Lassie Come Home. It was very rare to get contemporary new books. My aunt once gave me new books at Christmas. I cherished them. One was about a flivver.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, most kids watched TV to keep themselves entertained, but I read books, as we didn’t have a TV, and reception was at best, tricky in the valley. This was before the era of cable TV. Our neighbors, the Stones, had a TV so we watched Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Sea Hunt, Rawhide, Bonanza when the reception was working. There were two to three broadcast channels, with lots of snow—depending upon the vagaries of weather—and there were few programs to watch. 

But in the Stone’s old milking barn, on a high shelf, I discovered the entire Wizard of Oz collection (1900-1920) that must have belonged to Stephanie Stone’s mother—books that would’ve been considered old when she was a child. I plowed through the dusty tomes in record time. I didn’t ask for permission to borrow them, I surreptitiously snuck them home, one by one. I was transported. A baker’s dozen wasn’t enough, I wanted more. And, no I hadn’t yet seen the movie. No TV.

I also ordered armloads of cheap paperbacks from Scholastic Book Services. They were probably out of copyright, ergo older titles, not current ones. They were cheap. Most titles cost ten cents, hardbacks were 15 cents—a dollar bought an armload of books. I did chores for the neighbors in order to buy those books. Every dime represented an hour or two’s escape from reality.  

When my monthly SBS book order came, kids jeered at me, saying no way was I reading all those books, but I read every single one before my next order came. And no, I never read Clifford the Big Red Dog. It was The Little Witch, Pipí Longstocking, Black Beauty, and stories of ghosts, lost dogs and ponies. I gave away boxes of SBS books to younger friends.

Our school library was very small, we didn’t have a local public library, so the Bookmobile was our main source of books. I remember checking out a beautiful gilt-edged 1903 first edition, with an embossed cover, of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms (but not the story), to give you an idea of how old some of those books really were. 

What makes this all so funny, is that I didn’t even learn to read until the end of third grade. I hated Dick, Jane and that stupid dog, Spot. I was bored to tears with them and their goddam dog, I think I was insulted, and stubbornly refused to learn how to read. I wanted Allingham’s The Fairies. I can still quote some of it.

My mother said I was already singing my alphabet and reading in pre-kindergarten. I briefly attended a French nursery school, so I knew some things. I could count the stars and sing nursery rhymes in French. But when I went to Lagunitas School, kindergarten was for babies. And I said so. Lagunitas was regressive. They wouldn’t let me paint, school felt like pure punishment. All I wanted to do was play, or paint. I liked singing, the teacher sometimes banged out simple songs on piano. 

My mother was an artist so art was my first language. Even though I was the youngest one in the class, I was bored out of my gourd, and I dropped out of kindergarten. For real. It was also a long way from our house down Arroyo Road, to the highway. It was a whole mile, and I was only four-going-on-five years old, with very short legs, and an even shorter attention span.

Best thing my grandmother ever did was not forcing me to go to back to school. However, there was hell to pay in first grade. That negative karma followed me all through school. I had trouble learning. But I do remember the day I learned to read in third grade. 

Sometime in April or May, it was as if a switch had been thrown. And suddenly I could read. Breakthrough. The secret was simple, Miss Lenz left me alone in a corner with the new science-based SRA reading card series. I was off and running. I was a house afire—mad for reading. 

In two months, I read all those laminated SRA cards I could get my hands on—through to the 5th grade level. I learned about echolocation and sonar. But I couldn’t answer the quiz questions. No one knew that I had a learning disability. Then, when I was 30, I discovered I had dyslexia. Bingo. It all fell into place. 

In the past, I was routinely sent to the corner during reading time, with nothing to do. Punishment because I couldn’t keep up, or on track, during the reading aloud circle. I loved when Mrs. Bryce read aloud from The Phantom Tollbooth after lunch. But to this day, I hate to be read aloud to, unless I’m held captive in my car.

When I was in my 30s, I made up for lost time and finally did read some of those childhood classics from the 1950s-1960s, so that I could relate to what my young students were reading. I was teaching kids how to write poetry and it seems only fair that I was familiar with what they were reading in the classroom. I must admit that I loved reading about The Chronicles of Narnia, and Island of the Blue Dolphins. Still haven’t read any Cleary, Norton, or Sendak. 

What were your favorite childhood books? 

Revised from a Facebook  post 1/21.